Too Many Games 2013 – Saturday June 16th Recap

To start things off, words cannot describe exactly how awesome this years Too Many Games (TMG) logo is! The Castlevania font is a damn good look. The Facebook cover photo was so sick I stole it for this post. All these awesome video game characters all meeting up at Drac’s castle. Completely bad ass!

I was excited to see this Castlevania theme carried over to the guest badges this year as well. Regrettably, I do not have a picture of this to share and I left my badge in Droo’s fiancee’s car. The regular guest badge said “Villager” on the bottom. Which I thought was a nice touch to play into the whole theme. If you were special, like us, your badge stated your station with the convention. Ours said Media, not sure the official name the other special people got.  I’m assuming things like “Vendor” and “Staff”, things like that. I didn’t pay enough attention I suppose. This would largely be in part to all the awesome merchandise that was available. I was far too distracted by things like this:

So, needless to say the merchandise was plentiful and there were a lot of cool unique things available for purchase. Rare collectibles, art, and games out the wazoo. Hell, if you weren’t trying to go all 3 days for the reasonable cost of only $25. The $20 fee for just Saturday, or the even cheaper $15 for just Sunday would be worth it just to have access to all the things you could buy. Or, you could be a poopy pants and say “I could just buy all this stuff online for cheaper”. Which, although that’s true. Visiting a website never exactly blows your mind the way a room full of merchandise does.

Fine, fine. Perhaps that was a ridiculous statement. You should never have to pay to enter a venue solely for shopping. I do find the 3-day admission fee to the con, $25, reasonable. Especially if you enjoy tournaments and live Video Game cover bands. With the price points for the 1 day passes being so close, it’s obviously not much of a deal to go only one of the days. However, it’s certainly not always easy to commit 3-days to something. Hence why we only have one day of coverage… If it’s all you can manage, I’d say its still worth it though.

The concert area dubbed “The Power Bar” was a sweet set up. Giant open room with a full stage set up. This was the first Too Many Games I attended, but I believe in the past they didn’t have this stage set up, at least not for everyone that performed. I kinda expected the performers to be on floor level stuffed in a corner or something. It was cool to see this big stage. Though, it seemed some of the acts I caught, like Keith Apicary and Rainbowdragoneyes, preferred to be down on the floor with the spectators.
However, this totally happened during Rainbowdragoneyes:

He rocked out with the Mario Bros.! Can’t really argue with that decision. I would’ve left the stage to party with those guys too! Please excuse the low quality image, I do not own a camera. Nor am I any good at photography. Anyway..

My biggest regret was not being able to see more of the concerts. If you aren’t aware, last year Walnut caught some awesome concert footage of Brentalfloss and our friends, the X Hunters.

Another cool area, which touches close to home for me, was the Indie Game Showcase. This area was smack dab in the middle of everything so you had to pass by it on your way around the con. Excellent exposure for all these indie game devs which is exciting. I saw a lot of people checking out the games and talking to the devs. In this area I ran into some old classmates from college. They started an indie team called Wimbus Studios. They have spent the past 2+ years working on their game “The Island of Eternal Struggle”. I spent some time playing it and I’ll tell you what, you need to go to their website right now, shoot them an email and request the demo of that game. Do it! It’s laid out like a classic SNES RPG but there’s a little element of action based combat during the turn-based battles. Definitely a neat concept, we’ll surely have more to say about it in the future.

Just like everything else at this convention. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in the Indie Dev area. I would’ve liked to check out more of the projects, but when you only have one day nothing much you can do but say maybe next year. As a Philadelphia sports fan I’m very familiar with that saying…

The gaming/tournament area was pretty standard for a con. They had a flippin’ couch which was sweet. They had a wide-array of consoles and games, classic to current-gen. One of the stand out things for us was the Tecmo Super Bowl ’13 tournament which Drootin participated in. I’ll leave that up to him to talk about in another post but it was cool to see a tournament for a custom-made ROM of a classic NES game. Not really much else I can say about this area. I guess that’s fairly disappointing considering the theme of the event. Though in my experience at cons, which includes having staffed the gaming area several times. Nothing ever really excites me about these areas anymore. I’m not fond of the ridiculous people I always end up encountering in the gaming area, nor the smell many of them often omit from their bodies.. I find this to be the place to go to find your stereotypical “nerd”. Of course, that’s not true of everyone that goes to game-on. It just happens to be a decent amount of them. I don’t mean to offend anyone, its just my opinion, though I think many would tend to agree.

The last two areas I need to address are the Arcade and Tabletop gaming. From what I understand, Tabletop gaming was everything you’d want it to be. I unfortunately did not have any cards with me so I could not participate in Magic or Yugioh!. People were constantly battling it out over there and it would’ve been sick to get in the action.

The arcade had several classics such as Donkey Kong, Joust, and Punch Out, all the way up to current arcade smash-hits like Guitar Hero. It was sad to see many of the machines un-manned on several occasions. We gamers should relish at the opportunity for Free-Play arcade machines! Perhaps this was because the machines were located in the back of the convention center. Or, like the recent movie Wreck-it-Ralph touched on, maybe people just don’t care about those old games anymore. I hope that’s not true, but you know… people gotta get their Call of Duty on these days and such…BLAH!

As, Walnut mentioned last year in his recap. There was an awful lot of open space at this convention. I guess this is because all-in-all, this was a small convention spread out across a very large space. Although everything was done very well, you could walk around the whole convention in just a couple minutes. The key to this one is not the size, its what you do while you’re there. If you get involved in the tournaments, check out the concerts, and panels, which we’ll touch on in later posts. You can easily make a whole weekend out of this con. If you don’t like to schedule things in to your day you will likely be very bored at Too Many Games. However, that pretty much goes for any conventions! If you don’t plan to see panels, shop, or participate in tournaments, you probably shouldn’t be there at all. I think if you heed that warning, and you aren’t a fkin’ lamer, you’ll love TMG. I know I enjoyed my time there. wish I could have partaken in more activities, and I hope next year One-Quest gets to roll out in full force!

I hope you enjoyed my rant. This ain’t all folks.
Stay tuned for our Video recap and more!

Anthony is a writer, video editor, and helps out with website upkeep at One-Quest.com You can Email Anthony or follow Anthony on Twitter @A_Daprile or Facebook

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